Communications between networked devices can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Users can communicate with one another via voice connections; users can browse content on other systems or devices; messages can be sent using services such as Short Messaging Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS); messages may be e-mailed; and so forth. Some communications, such as SMS/MMS messaging and e-mail, may not involve real-time communication between the end users. Other communications involve an actual or logical connection between the communicating parties. A “session” generally refers to a logical connection between computers or other devices and the communications exchanged between those devices while they are connected. A multimedia session involves a set of multimedia senders and receivers and the data streams flowing therebetween.
Users who may be involved in such network sessions may be in situations where they are willing to accept incoming calls, messages, or other multimedia communications. At other times, the users may not want to be disturbed. Today's communications technologies provide communication initiators with ample abilities to contact their targeted communication recipients, particularly with the prolific use of mobile devices. Mobile device users tend to keep their mobile devices with them most or all of the time, which provides great convenience to the users, but may also cause interruptions when incoming communications are unwanted or otherwise inconvenient. For example, a user may enter a business meeting, and may not want to be disturbed by incoming voice or media calls. The users therefore have times, locations, and/or situations where they are, or are not, willing or able to accept incoming communications. This concept is generally referred to as the user's “presence.”
Generally, presence refers to the willingness and/or ability of a user to communicate with other users over a network. A variety of different preference indicators may be associated with a user's preference, such as user availability, connection status, various user identities, device capabilities, and the like. Users can set and modify their presence state at their respective terminals, and this presence information can be used to manage incoming communication requests.
However, some networks do not take the users' presence status into account. For example, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) IP Multimedia core network Subsystem (IMS) is an architecture for supporting multimedia services via a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) infrastructure. In an IMS network, after a user has set his/her presence information, he/she will still receive incoming media calls or other session initiation requests even though undesired, where the network does not consider the presence status of the user.
Accordingly, there is a need for a manner of ensuring that users' presence information is considered for communications over networks such as IMS networks. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and offers other advantages over the prior art.